Shefali Tsabary > Quotes

“When you parent, it’s crucial you realize you aren’t raising a “mini me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own signature. For this reason, it’s important to separate who you are from who each of your children is. Children aren’t ours to possess or own in any way. When we know this in the depths of our soul, we tailor our raising of them to their needs, rather than molding them to fit our needs.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“It’s no surprise we fail to tune into our children’s essence. How can we listen to them, when so many of us barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life?”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“Life is to be experienced, not fought against, run from, or engaged halfheartedly. Though we may wish to make changes in the future, to be conscious is to be with an experience as it’s unfolding, rather than thinking about how we would like to change it. Taking charge of our life so that we alter the quality of our experiences in the future comes after an experience.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“to enter into a state of pure connection with your child, you can achieve this by setting aside any sense of superiority.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“Children learn who they are and what they really enjoy if they are allowed to sit with themselves. Inundated with activity and subjected to lesson upon lesson, how can they hope to recognize their authentic voice amid the din of all this “doing?”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“My child isn’t my easel to paint on Nor my diamond to polish My child isn’t my trophy to share with the world Nor my badge of honor My child isn’t an idea, an expectation, or a fantasy Nor my reflection or legacy My child isn’t my puppet or a project Nor my striving or desire My child is here to fumble, stumble, try, and cry Learn and mess up Fail and try again Listen to the beat of a drum faint to our adult ears And dance to a song that revels in freedom My task is to step aside Stay in infinite possibility Heal my own wounds Fill my own bucket And let my child fly —Shefali Tsabary, PhD”
― Shefali Tsabary, Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn't Work... and What Will

“Once you accept your children’s basic nature, you can contour your style to meet their temperament. To do so means letting go of your fantasies of yourself as a certain kind of parent and instead evolving into the parent you need to be for the particular child in front of you.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“Our children pay a heavy price when we lack consciousness. Overindulged, over-medicated, and over-labeled, many of them are unhappy. This is because, coming from unconsciousness ourselves, we bequeath to them our own unresolved needs, unmet expectations, and frustrated dreams. Despite our best intentions, we enslave them to the emotional inheritance we received from our parents, binding them to the debilitating legacy of ancestors past. The nature of unconsciousness is such that, until it’s metabolized, it will seep through generation after generation. Only through awareness can the cycle of pain that swirls in families end. T”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“The more we hone this ability to meet life in a neutral state, without attributing “goodness” or “badness” to what we are encountering, but simply accepting its as-is-ness, the less our need to interpret every dynamic as if it were about us. Our children can then have their tantrums without triggering us, and we can correct their behavior without dumping on them our own residual resentment, guilt, fear, or distrust.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“Do you see me?” This is the big question your child is asking every day. “Can you recognize me for who I am, different from your dreams and expectations for me, separate from your agenda for me?”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Awakened Family: How to Raise Empowered, Resilient, and Conscious Children

“The idea that “I need to be happy” or “my child deserves to be happy” comes from a sense that the present moment is somehow lacking. In other words, we see our life through a lens of scarcity, noticing all the things we don’t have instead of the abundant way the universe provides for us. And so, as the Declaration of Independence sanctions, we set off in “the pursuit of happiness,” not realizing that this can never bring us happiness. On the contrary, it’s the breeding ground of discontent and disappointment. You”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Awakened Family: How to Raise Empowered, Resilient, and Conscious Children

“After all, how can we hope to raise our children to be freethinkers and free-spirited if we aren’t these things ourselves? How can we raise independent, autonomous children if we ourselves aren’t independent and autonomous? How can we raise another human being, another spirit, if our own being has been largely dismissed, our spirit systematically squelched? It may be helpful for me to share with you some of the areas in which I am learning to accept myself: I accept I am a human being before I am a parent I accept I have limitations and many shortcomings, and this is okay I accept I don’t always know the right way I accept I am often ashamed to admit my own failings I accept I frequently lose my center worse than my child ever does I accept I can be selfish and unthinking in my dealings with my child I accept I sometimes fumble and stumble as a parent I accept I don’t always know how to respond to my child I accept that at times I say and do the wrong thing with my child I accept that at times I’m too tired to be sane I accept that at times I’m too preoccupied to be present for my child I accept I am trying my best, and that this is good enough I accept my imperfections and my imperfect life I accept my desire for power and control I accept my ego I accept my yearning for consciousness (even though I often sabotage myself when I am about to enter this state). When”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“When you parent, it’s crucial you realize you aren’t raising a “mini me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own signature. For this reason, it’s important to separate who you are from who each of your children is.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“Often it’s the adjustment of our expectations, rather than reality itself, that’s the hurdle we have to leap. When”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“We cannot control our children. We can only create the conditions for them to rise. What this means is that we need to stop expending our energy on trying to control who they are and how they turn out in the future. The real challenge is to keep our eyes on the parameters that are truly under our control - ourselves, and the way the home functions.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Awakened Family: A Revolution in Parenting

“Because children are essentially good, when we see a child hit, it ought to evoke in us an empathic response such as, “What pain they must be in to feel the need to hit.”
― Shefali Tsabary, Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn't Work... and What Will

“All we need to do is model. When our children realize we are perfectly okay with our okayness, it encourages a feeling of competence within them. By delighting in our follies, we teach our children not to take themselves too seriously. By being willing to make a fool of ourselves as we try new things, we teach them to explore life with little care for how they “look” or perform. I”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“I ask to be released from the notion that I have any power or jurisdiction over my child's spirit. I release my child from the need to obtain my approval, as well as from the fear of my disapproval. I will give my approval freely as my child has earned this right. I ask for the wisdom to appreciate the sparkle of my child ordinariness. I ask for the ability not to base my child's being on grades or milestones reached. I ask for the grace to sit with my child each day and simply revel in my child's presence. I ask for a reminder of my own ordinariness and the ability to bask in its beauty. I'm not here to judge or approve my child's natural state. I'm not here to determine what course my child's life should take. I'm here as my child's spiritual partner. My child's spirit is infinitely wise and will manifest itself in exactly the way it's meant to. My child's spirit will reflect the manner in which I am invited to respond to my own essence.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“At the end of the day this has nothing to do with him. This is all about you—how you attracted him into your life and how you kept him engaged in a cycle of dysfunction. If you focus on him, you will lose. You need to focus on your inner void, since this is what keeps this dynamic alive.”
― Shefali Tsabary, A Radical Awakening: Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free – A Clinical Psychologist's Guide to Authenticity and Conscious Fulfillment for Women

“As a parent, I repeatedly find myself presented with opportunities to respond to my daughter as if she were a real person like myself, with the full range of feelings I experience—the same longing, hope, excitement, imagination, ingenuity, sense of wonder, and capacity for delight. Yet like many parents, I tend to become so caught up in my own agenda that I often miss the opportunity afforded by these moments. I find myself so conditioned to sermonize, so oriented to teaching, that I am often insensitive to the wondrous ways in which my child reveals her uniqueness, showing us she’s a being unlike any other who has ever walked this planet. When”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

“Children come to us full of the what is, not what isn’t. When we see our own reality for all it isn’t, we teach our children to operate from lack. When we see our children for all they are yet to become, barely recognizing all they already are, we teach them they are incomplete. For our children to see a look of disappointment in our eyes sows in them seeds of anxiety, self-doubt, hesitation, and inauthenticity. They then begin to believe they should be more beautiful, competent, smart, or talented. In this way, we strip them of their enthusiasm for expressing themselves as they are right now.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“When a woman tells the daring truth of what she has endured, she moves away from being mired in individual fear toward a new emotion—love. She declares, “I love myself. I am worthy of being heard. I am more than the sum of my past. I trust my voice.”
― Shefali Tsabary, A Radical Awakening: Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free – A Clinical Psychologist's Guide to Authenticity and Conscious Fulfillment for Women

“Because we weren’t taught by either our parents or society to access our inner stillness and find the roots of our pain and pleasure within ourselves, we are reactive to external circumstances. Since we didn’t learn to simply observe our emotions, honor them, sit with them, and grow from them, our response to external stimuli became increasingly emotionally toxic, which is the root of our cyclones of drama. When we are raised to suppress our darker emotions, these emotions form a shadow from which we are cut off. When emotions are split from our consciousness, they lie dormant, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice, which is why so many of us erupt out of the blue. Whenever these emotions are triggered by another’s shadow, we find ourselves upset with the person who evoked these emotions in us. Again, let me emphasize that no one could evoke such emotions in us were they not already part of our shadow.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“Life doesn’t happen to us, but happens with us.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“We are triggered not by their behavior, but by our own unresolved emotional issues.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Awakened Family: How to Raise Empowered, Resilient, and Conscious Children

“The corporate world is also a manifestation of people’s disconnection from their heart, where people believe manipulation is the path to getting what they want and therefore the way to succeed. People often use the excuse that “everyone does it.” When a child learns at home that not everyone does it, things can start to change. The corporate world even celebrates the cutthroat approach of stepping over others, knifing them in the back, and scrambling to the top of the ladder at the expense of colleagues—behavior that reflects an inability to connect with and care for others.”
― Shefali Tsabary, Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn't Work... and What Will

“When reality doesn’t go according to our expectations, instead of reacting, we tell ourselves, “Surrender, let go, detach, examine the expectation.” Our thoughts and emotions are a reflection of our inner state and require observation, not reaction. We forge a connection with our inner being on a moment-by-moment basis. Unafraid to sit in our solitude, we invoke inner stillness. This enables us to pause before we interpret something and react to our interpretation.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“When we allow toxicity to exist for the sake of peace, we are actually perpetuating war. There is no real peace where there is no authenticity. Lasting peace only emerges from an honest acceptance of oneself and one’s life experiences.”
― Shefali Tsabary, A Radical Awakening: Turn Pain into Power, Embrace Your Truth, Live Free – A Clinical Psychologist's Guide to Authenticity and Conscious Fulfillment for Women

“By silently witnessing our thoughts and feelings, we learn to accept them as they are, allowing them to rise and fall within us without resisting them or reacting to them. As you learn to be with your emotions, they will no longer overwhelm you. In the full acceptance of surrender, which is of a quite different character from mere resignation, you come to see that pain is simply pain, nothing more and nothing less. Yes, pain is painful— it’s meant to be. However, when you don’t fuel your pain by either resisting or reacting, but sit with it, it transforms itself into wisdom. Your wisdom will increase in line with your capacity for embracing all of your feelings, whatever their nature. Along with increased wisdom comes a greater capacity for compassion.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children

“It is what it is.” This means we parent our children as our children are, not as we might wish them to be.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Emowering Our Children